geocaching tag cloud

We’re slowly getting closer to spring! It was about 12°C even in
the late afternoon of the weekend, and I took out my bike on Sunday
(helped a friend with cleaning up after moving on Saturday). Sadly,
three DNFs (one search aborted due to the law enforcement approaching,
one not even attempted due to too many muggles – although I already
had logged another cache with almost the same name in exactly the same
location –, and the third one not done because a certain institution’s
garden has different opening times during winter period and I didn’t
quite want to risk using the fire fighters’ entrance, like some other
logger. Not even for a coin.

The IcedTea cross-compile patch and the OpenJDK BSD patchkit are
not build system compatible. I probably need to go the route of using
compat_openbsd(8) for it. Kurt Miller said if I sigh Sun’s agreement
chances are good MirBSD support making it upstream (into the patchkit,
for now, but maybe eventually into OpenJDK 7). MirUsers will just have
to use a binary package I provide for bootstrap.

I’ve built i386 and sparc intermediate snapshots. We’ve been fixing
things lately, so that another combined DuaLive CD is not so far off,
before the more weird things (such as the 4.4OpenBSD merge) start to
happen. On an unrelated side note, my SPARCstation 20 is crunching for
BOINC at the moment, at about 75 MIPS only though…

Maybe LLVM 2.4 and llvm-gcc 4.2 will hit the MirPorts Framework now,
because we need a recent compiler for some things (Objective-C, or to
compile Webkit), and it’s better in terms of licencing (BSD + GPLv2),
quality and portability than FSF GCC. Maybe someone ports Iced Tea so
that comrad will be happy. I don’t know. It’s all our spare time.

There are a few things in libpng that need to be taken care of
first though, but the other recent security issues (ftpd(8) must die
anyway, IPv6 ndp, …) were handled. Maybe others, let’s see.

Ah, and of course I need to get the Live CD functionality fixed and
switched to use NetBSD® makefs(8) instead of J�rg’s mkisofs first.

I still don’t believe in Web 2.0, Communities, etc. For example, on
Ohloh (I still need to take care to not write oh lol!) there are quite
some projects, but “nobody” (well, almost) uses them. CacheWolf, the
geocaching software of choice, starts a conversion from the Ewe VM to
the supposedly superiour Eve VM, but I yet fail to see success, still
people want to already switch over the svn trunk, and only bugfix in
the 1.0 branch… as if anything were usable before next spring, and a
full replacement before end of next year or so, guesstimated………

Jonathan complains about the brokenness of software, libobjfw is
suffering from GNU libobjc runtime bugs (a layer deeper, that is).
I so feel with him, I know the feeling so well… sometimes it would
really be better to be a cat. I also quite met with Azraël, Florian’s
(my best friend) animal half – with approximately 13 kg much more of
a beast than the neighbour’s cat I nicknamed “Mir” (just to name it
after a BSD) and behaving much more “cool”, but very nice.

Hum. This year’s FrOSCon… sucks. At least the catering, which was
so much better last year (remembering the Chili con Carne, as well
as the Chili non (sin) Carne, fondly… these were produced by wbx@’s
family members, which haven’t been included in this year’s planning
so some other persons did the catering). And being waked up at 04:00
in the morning due to a call on the mobile phone, for taking care of
some drunken booth slave *grml…*, didn’t help either.

The evening’s social event also sucked totally. Since it had been
raining until shortly before, they decided to have it inside, except
the barbecue of course, but didn’t adjust the volume of the music
played to the environment, which caused me to leave the MirOS/XF86
booth in favour of the Debian/grml booth, talking to Mika and Joey…
who, like me, didn’t quite like being LITERALLY punched into our
stomach by the basses. I left relatively early then, especially as
the cocktails (Vutral brought me one, since I couldn’t go near the
counter due to the volume of the… whatever they call music) tasted
pretty bad and had a (too?) high percentage of alcohol. But talking
to the various people, not just Mika and Joey, was good, even though
just being at the FH (university) during the social event was really
unbearable and physically endangering one’s health.

Other than that, we had quite a lot of fun at the conference, as
usual. I still think it has chances to close up to FOSDEM, but they
will have to make sure the catering does not get even worse. While
FOSDEM does not have any catering, FrOSCon 2006 and 2007
had good food, and regressions count as malus. Once I found
Marc Aurele La France at the train station (which was quite a task),
things went well – he even fixed a bug in our xdm configuration at
the conference. The bug was inherited from OpenBSD, as usual ☺
Marc also said he enjoyed himself.

I hacked an Asus EeePC… MirOS mostly works (no NIC though), and the
graphics card runs at 640x480 VESA… with the new 915resolution port of
today, it might do the 800x480, but I can’t test now.

I took the chance to discover a geocache in St. Augustin yesterday,
but, while Benny suggested we (him, me and gecko2) go caching in Bonn
today, they seem to prefer hacking on the laptops (considering the
weather, this is not the worst idea though), so I got time to write a
wlog entry (too). I still have some things on my TODO, like fixing the
ports with unfetchable distfiles, but hey. Taking the day before
and the day after the conference off is A Good Thing™. Next one
will be the Software Freedom
Day in Baarn, Nederland – where not even Wim will go ☺ But I need
a car… parents don’t help even if you ask them once a year,
but maybe Jonathan from (near) Aachen will join me, he has a car.

My Thinkpad X40 will probably arrive today or tomorrow. Sadly, I
didn’t invest any time in evaluating the products before… I learned
that the ‘T’ series has 2.5" HDDs instead of the sucky 1.6" HDDs, and
a much more solid lid chassis, at FrOSCon. My decision to buy an X40
was based solely on the observation that it was “in” at most
OpenBSD developers some years ago (and thusly would most certainly
work well with MirOS). Don’t do that then…

Once it’s there, I got to set it up and continue working. It’s bad
odem broke so badly, especially as my current contractor
(employer, except not quite so) would rather have me working full-time
on the project, which is not entirely possible since I still have a
life here. But upon setting it up, I might upgrade and/or fix some of
the ports, since I’m at it anyway. Plus I get /home encryption.

Marc agreed to merging as much of our X11 changes (both these
inherited from OpenBSD’s XF4 module and our own patches) into
the XFree86® main tree, some ifdef’d, and helping us migrate to the new
4.7 or upcoming 4.8 release (or probably, 4.8.99.01, since I don’t think
the merge will be there in time for 4.8 proper). He was a fun guy and
well understanding our issues. The most funny part however was Thomas
from Sourcemage (SMGL), who also
maintains the mksh spell in their
grimoire, considering to retain supporting XFree86® (and modular X.org,
but not the buggy monolithic X.org) iff it’s still actively developed,
which Marc assured me it is.

Benny agrees that the “Kaiser’s BIO-Kaffee” is decent, despite its
pricing of only 3.99 €/£ (may be my high quality milk too, though).

Don’t wonder if I appear online less often these days and commit weird
and plain ugly things. I’m young and need the money</asr>

Uh, EXPN? Sure. I’m currently working for a company and a customer who
both originally were basically the local CCC meet cast into a company. I
need to learn a lot of things, and my view of the world has been utterly
turned upside down.

At least, I was able to spot some geocaches in the more obscure parts…
some would call it primitif… of the world. And in the Elsaß.

Ah, X11… the input is passed as keycode, not as keysym… it’s not easy,
trying to write a thing for entering unicode hex chars (damn US keyboard
missing the “<>|” key). IME won’t go. Maybe fake a selection and a
paste event. Compose works, but only in xterm, which grows from 8 MiB to
34 MiB size and 1 minute startup time, each, when expanding composure. I
don’t think that’s worth it, even if unicode is big.

As a new “standard”, we’ll #define all functions we introduce
to themselves, like arc4random_pushk(3), to rid autohell.

As requested, Benny
has written to Apple, Inc. about inclusion of mksh. Lucas “laffer1” Holt
of MidnightBSD has said to follow, as has Andreas “gecko2” Gockel, the
Fink maintainer for mksh. Link to this entry.

Lucas actually said he would care more about and use mksh(1) if it
were integrated in Mac OSX, as most MidnightBSD developers (like Benny)
do most of their work on a Macintosh. He has integrated mksh in his
operating system quite some time ago.

mksh is also the default shell, including /bin/sh, on
FreeWRT Embedded GNU/Linux.

Andreas already has run tests for using mksh(1) as /bin/sh
on Darwin, although I did not request that personally, and brought up
the question of /etc/profile adjustments and ~/.mkshrc
integration. (FreeWRT has a changed system-wide profile including a
system-wide copy of the mkshrc file; other possible ways would involve
setting $ENV or (preferred) placing .mkshrc in the
New User’s Skeleton and in root’s home directory, if existent.

Strong points of mksh: free (as in BSD,
now even without advertising clause), small, fast, portable, easy to use,
can run many ksh93 and bash scripts, is actively developed, and benefits
from the BSD development style (central development, security focus).

To everyone with an Apple ID: please suggest to Apple to include mksh(1),
write to them how good it is despite lacking popularity, how compatible it
is, and just how much you like to use it. Even if you do not use it yourself,
if you can follow our reasons, write to them. If you have access to other
operating systems, do the same, especially with mere porting frameworks, as
the OpenBSD ports tree still does not include our port, which was ready-made
for committing by me to reduce workload for them.

Some unrelated side notes… Geocacheing continues:
(Update: images moved here)
– Dr. Pfeffer especially liked mine^WWaldemar’s Zaurus SL-C3200 with
CacheWolf running on Ewe… even if I still think it’s dead slow. Interestingly,
porting Ewe to the iPhone G3 would not violate the clause preventing you from
creating “instant messaging or real time navigation software”, and CacheWolf
itself would not have to be ported. I’d like to have more RAM on the Z though
– maybe via the SD Card slot?SCSI sucks. And mksh gets better… IRIX,
and a bug fix. Just still no SunOS 5.5 (missing /usr on the HDD).

On an unrelated note, mksh needs
people running the current development version, to prevent mishaps like
the one with the fullwidth characters causing wrong text output. To do
that, use AnonCVS like this:% env CVS_RSH=ssh cvs -qz3 -d
_anoncvs@anoncvs.mirbsd.org:/cvs co -PA mkshThen, as usual,
cd mksh && (sh Build.sh && ./test.sh -v) 2>&1
| tee log.txt to build and test it. Then, especially if it fails,
send the logs to me.

Ewe is an embedded VM for
some Java™ 1.1 compatible stuff. I had to fork it to use it on MirBSD
and to be able to fix it. So well. It now builds on gecko2@’s Macbook.
Using MirMake, of course *g* It’s even usable… which means that he can
now use CacheWolf and his laptop
to go geocaching.

Speaking of geocaching: more stats bragging… although a little different
this time:
〔fwrtcommitstats removed due to FreeWRT archival〕
Although only the first two are CacheWolf committers…

Ah, damnit. It freezes the usbserial (Prolific) driver when accessing
the serial port. Well, Apple… they don’t even use GNU as(1) either.

Luckily, my internet uplink has been stable for more than 4⅓ days now,
after repeated phoning (an 0800 number then) and resetting the NTBBA.

Some more statistics:

Geocacheing continues:
(Update: images moved here)
– now I’ve hidden my first two traditional micros (easy series), and
one of them even is sort of a “lost+found” directory virtual
cache overload.

BOINC continues, I’m in 9 projects now:
While only 8 projects show up at the moment, this’ll improve once
the last project delivers in a result (it were more projects actually,
but some don’t even work on hephaistos…) – now the first WCG valid WU
returned from MirBSD! (MidnightBSD can’t, because I can’t run brandelf
on the signed binaries of the apps… sucks to be FreeBSD derived ☻☺)

Ah, and, by the way: XTaran did not like external links, especially not
secure links (https) in my wlog entries, so Planet Symlink doesn’t get
them now (as it pulls via RSS), but you can look at it on the wlog.

… in contrast to when I was in Bruxelles, as Benny and gecko2 didn’t seem
to want to have time for that (or walk at all, they coerced me into the
tram). This time, I went cacheing with Tonnerre, and he kind of lined it.

Time to push opencaching in Switzerland. He said he might even drop some
caches (although – jokingly I hope/suppose – his first idea was „Finding
Sandro“, where the cache is a person… or his home appartement). Likewise,
I’ll push OC (and, a little, TC) whereever I’m going to live or lived.

While here, special greetings to the TGIF@BS meeting which I won’t attend,
as I’ll take an earlier train back home tomorrow. It was nice here, much more
so than in, for instance, Berlin.

Perl is evil. But knowing the basics of other programming languages helps.
I guess I’ll invest some time into learning perl better, so that I can get
rid of it (in MirPorts, for example), and better understand what others try
to write in it (so it can be converted to mksh if possible, or at least
fixed or optimised).

People can be quite annoying at times (mostly in Jabber, but also via
eMail or IRC). Hey, if I just don’t reply my current location per eMail,
sending another one asking specifically for it again isn’t going
to improve my mood. Neither is constantly annoying me with enquiries about
whether I’m really gonna move („zügeln“) here or not, after I had
already stated I’ll think over it next weekend (or so), since I have a few
reasons pro et contra, some of which are orthogonal to what I see
here. I concentrate on getting a feel right now. Oh, and texting me one
messager after another in Jabber (or, worse, by SMS to my Natel) even if
I don’t reply (which, on the other hand, does not imply I’m willing
to conversate either!) just gets on my nerves. And: go fucking RTFM, and
don’t fucking bother me with „the XXXXU2B controller doesn’t exist, because
the vendor website only lists the XXXXU2W“ – if you know any vendor
websites you should long know better than to trust them.

For what it’s worth: for building MirEwe, you need very current
MirMake (at least 20080411), g++, GTK+1.2, GTK+2, libjpeg, zlib, and their
development headers. It should work on GNU/Linux and the BSDs for now. No
platform other than i386 has been tested yet, but I’ll take on the Zaurus
running OpenBSD, I guess, as I finally got the uplcom(4) working. Ah, and
to rebuild the class libraries you need ecj and paxmirabilis/MirCpio – I
did the ecj part on Debian and the rest on MirBSD.